Breeders’ Cup Artist Church Brings Passion for Horses to Art

British Artist Captured Essence of Del Mar for 2024 Breeders’ Cup World Championships

“How refreshing it is in the era in which we live to find a young artist portraying the rich diversity of our rural heritage with such a unique sensitivity and profound understanding of his subject matter.”

That’s what the then-Prince of Wales (now King Charles III) wrote about Charles Church in 2002. The British artist was just 31 and already taking the sporting art world by storm with his exquisite renditions of prize-winning Thoroughbreds. Today, Church’s work isn’t only lauded by royalty, like Lady Lloyd Webber and His Highness Aga Khan IV, it can be found in their homes around the world. That includes the largest painting he’s ever completed, a 36-square-foot canvas of John Holliday, Huntsman of the Belvoir, unveiled last summer by Her Majesty the Queen, which now hangs in King Charles II’s bedroom at Palace House as part of the British Sporting Art Trust collection.

Such commissions are all in a day’s work for one of the world’s foremost equestrian painters and this year’s official artist for the 2024 Breeders’ Cup World Championships. To date, Church, who is often compared to giant of the genre Sir Alfred Munnings, has painted 90 Grade 1 winners. But like many with a passion for field sports, Church’s fascination with horses began in much more humble beginnings on the tracks.

“At around 15 or 16, I really got into painting, and it was at that exact same time that I really got into horse racing,” Church says. “I just started painting horses. I never really wanted to do anything else.”

That driven mindset would take him from Northumberland to attend Newcastle College, then Arts University Bournemouth. “But they didn’t really cater to what I wanted to do. It was all a bit modern,” Church says. So he dropped out and made his way to Newmarket, where he washed dishes in the Swynford Paddocks Hotel. “I don’t know what my parents thought, but I just wanted to be near horses,” he says.

His gamble paid off. In the mornings and evenings, Church worked dishpan duty, and in the afternoons, he was left to his own devices sketching and painting the Thoroughbreds at Rowley Mile and the July Course. A gallery owner got wise to the upstart’s talent and bought out his work, which allowed Church to enroll in the Charles H. Cecil Studios in Florence, Italy, for two years. “It was old-master training, the kind that’s been sort of lost over the years,” Church says of his time in the capital of Tuscany. “Back then there were only two ateliers in Florence doing that kind of instruction.” It meant six hours a day of painting nudes, which, Church says, is very similar to painting horses. “You’re looking at muscle and tone,” he explains, which involves techniques critical to evoking the musculature of an animal.

On weekends, Church would do as his instructors insisted and paint from life. “I got to be friends with trainers at the Florence and Pisa racecourses, and they’d let me go down to the racecourse and sketch during weekends.”

Precision and an eye for detail come vividly to life in Church’s work, and a review of his commissions reads like a who’s who of horse racing’s finest. There’s his stirring portrait of Hurricane Run, a champion Irish-bred middle-distance Thoroughbred who took Ascot’s King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes (G1) in 2006. Or his pastoral depiction of the 2016 Epsom Derby (G1) winner, Harzand.

Church takes only eight to ten commissions a year and never rushes his process. In his studio in Dorset, he works from memory of his in-person visits to the stables of each of his subjects as well as with photographs he brings home. He has multiple paintings in the works at once and will pause or even turn one toward the wall at times to let paint dry or allow inspiration to move him. The Huntsman of the Belvoir, for instance, took him a year to complete.

He’s already well into preparations for his role at the Breeders’ Cup. His travels and commissions have taken him to nearly every track on the planet, but Del Mar, in San Diego, was a new addition. “I went out to California last August and did studies at the track,” Church says. “It’s an amazing place and very different from U.K. tracks. There was quite a carnival atmosphere of fun.” The result is two works that illustrate the oval “Where the turf meets the surf,” both featuring the course’s iconic yellow towers.

Ever the perfectionist, Church never unveils a new work until he’s sure it’s flawless—not just anatomically accurate, but imbued with the personality of the horse or, in the case of the Breeders’ Cup art, the atmosphere of the venue. That, Church says, is the lasting value in sporting art.

“In this digital age, paintings like this are more worthwhile than ever before,” Church says. “The difference with a commissioned painting compared with a photograph is that rather than being simply a facsimile of nature, it is a response by the artist to nature…allowing the owner to keep seeing new things in the painting for years after.